Studio Sergison Spring Semester 2010 Work/place

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Contents

5 Introduction 6 Theme: Work/place 8 Context: St. Giles12 First exercise: A study of work place 14 Second exercise: Survey 16 Reference Buildings18 Project20 Programme: Spring Semester 2010 22 Reading list24 Contacts

Aerial photograph of St. Giles area

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Introduction Jonathan Sergison

The studio will continue to investigate an urban architecture through the study of normative programmes. London will again be the setting for projects.

The theme for this semester’s work is work/place. A number of sites in the St. Giles area of central London have been selected. We will begin by looking at a standard work place to understand the social landscape of office space.

A number of exemplary office buildings will be studied and students will then start working individually. Projects should be developed firstly as carefully considered urban concepts and later as intelligently argued tectonic and typological solutions.

A visit to London will be organised at the beginning of the semester.

The studio will continue to be supported by lectures and seminars by invited experts.

Coenties Slip, New York/ Wall Street, Thomas Struth, 1978

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Theme: Work/place Jonathan Sergison

The direct correlation between productivity and employees’ sense of wellbeing has been recognised for a long time.

Many people spend more time at work than at home and the need to personalise a place of work needs to be considered in design. All too often one is bemused by the kind of general office detritus that is on display, when the designer of the building has insisted on floor-to-ceiling glazing for reasons of architectural purity.

Another crucial factor is the size of the office floor plate and the distance from the external envelope. Employees should not be far removed from natural light and interiors should retain a relationship with the surrounding city. Furthermore a deep-plan building is incapable of dealing with air movement in a passive way and is often reliant on energy consuming air conditioning.

It is invariably the interstitial, programmatically less determined spaces that prove to be the most vital: the landing of a staircase, the lift, or the location of a vending machine or photocopier as informal meeting places. The encounters they promote do not directly increase productivity but engender a sense of collectivity, which is beneficial to both employers and employees.

The tension between function and spaces without an obvious programme should be carefully judged, for they determine a good working environment. An office should be designed with more than a tight net-to-gross ratio in mind: we should be careful with the space between with in-between spaces. The size of the lifts, the sequence of spaces between street and desk, so as to support both flexibility and a sense of belonging.

3Water Street, New York,Thomas Struth, 1978

4The Economist Plaza, Alison and Peter Smithson, 1959-1964

1 Foyer of the Seagram Building,Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1958

2Office space inside the Seagram Building, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 1958

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Context: St Giles

St Giles’s Circus is the intersection of Oxford Street, New Oxford Street, Charing Cross Road and Tottenham Court Road in the West End of London. The word Circus is arguably a little misleading as the buildings around the traffic intersection are not all rounded, as with for example Oxford Circus. The area is historically known as St Giles’s, but can now be seen as the point where the corners of Soho, Covent Garden, Bloomsbury and Fitzrovia meet. From the Roman period to the mid 19th century, St. Giles’s High Street was the main approach to the City of London from the west. In the Middle Ages, the city’s gallows were located at St. Giles’s Circus alongside a cage for prisoners. Later, when the place of public execution was moved west to Tyburn Tree, the Angel Inn near the Circus became a stopping point for the condemned on the way to Tyburn where they would be offered a final drink. The Church of St Giles in the field next to the Inn was founded in 1116 by Matilda of Boulogne as a leper church and hospital whose estate ran south as far as today’s Shaftesbury Avenue. The current Grade 1 listed church is the third on the site and was re-built in a Palladian style in 1733.

In the 17th and 18th centuries the area became home to migrants and developed in an unplanned manner that became known as ‘the Rookery’ and was notorious for its crime, poverty, overcrowding and disease, with several outbreaks of plague starting there. William Hogarth depicted the area in his celebrated engraving Gin Lane.

The development of New Oxford Street and Shaftesbury Avenue in the mid 19th century broke up the area though the alleys and courts around Denmark Street retain some sense of this character and Denmark Street is one of the few streets in London where original 17th century terraced facades survive on both fronts. The area was bombed during the Second World War and the majority of the commercial development in the area

1 Shaftesbury Avenue

2New Oxford Street, looking east

3Soho Square, looking east towards Centre Point

4New Oxford Street, looking west towards Centre Point

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has been of poor character.

The area is today dominated by Centre Point Tower, located on the south-east corner on New Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. As part of the Centre Point project the developer was to have included a modern traffic roundabout and transport interchange but this part of the scheme was not delivered.

Tottenham Court Road tube station is located beneath the intersection and redevelopment to build a Crossrail station with a new entrance and public square which will be known as Centre Plaza is currently in progress.

1 Night skyline with Post Office Tower

2Newman Street at night

3Bedford Avenue

4Tottenham Court Road, looking south

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First exercise: A study of work space

Your first piece of work will be a study of an office interior, which will involve an investigation of what makes a place of work and a survey of the interior architecture of an office.

You will need to locate an existing office building with a large internal footprint. This should be somewhere you can gain access to easily. A carefully made photographic record of the space should be made. You should then make a large (1:10 or 1:20) scale model of this space recreating the image you have taken as a photograph. The model should then be carefully photographed to represent the atmosphere and character of this interior. A lecture will be given to help inform your understanding of the technique and conceptual basis for the study

1 Office, Christine Erhard, 1998

2Entrance hall, Christine Erhard, 1998

3Detail from “Kitchen”,Thomas Demand, 2004

4Detail from “Kitchen”,Thomas Demand, 2004

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Second exercise: Survey

A number of exemplary office buildings have been selected for study. These are all situated in central London and represent known types or solutions that can be instructive in terms of your own questioning of what a large office building is and how it might be possible to substantially develop a financially valuable central London site.

This exercise should be undertaken precisely and rigorously. Working in pairs, a 1:100 drawing should be produced of the ground floor, typical upper floor and elevations of the building you are studying. We would also expect you to produce reliable factual information about the building that will enable this work to form part of a common and shared body of knowledge.

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Reference buildings

1New Zealand House, Trafalgar Square, London WC2, RMJM, 1959-1963

2Euston Tower, 286 Euston Road, London NW1, Sidney Kaye, 1970, renovated by Arup Associates

3Centre Point, 101 New Oxford Street, London WC2, Richard Robin Seifert & Partners, 1959-64430 Finsbury Square, London EC2, Eric Parry Architects, 1999-2003

55 Aldermanbury Square, London EC4, Eric Parry Architects, 2001-2007 6 23 Savile Row, London W1, Eric Parry Architects, 2007-2009

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7The Economist Building, 25 St James’s Street, London SW1, Alison and Peter Smithson, 1959-64

8Holland House, Bury Street, London EC3, Hendrik Petrus Berlage (1914-16)

9 IBM Central London Marketing Centre, South Bank, London SW, Sir Denis Lasdun, 1978-84 10Broadgate, City of London, London EC2, Arup Associates with Skidmore Owings & Merrill, 1984-91

11ITN Headquarters,200 Grays Inn Road,London WC1, Foster and Partners, 1989-1990

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Project

Your project should be understood as three discrete but overlapping pieces of work.

Stage 1In the first stage we would ask you to develop an urban concept for your site. A collectively produced 1:500 massing model needs to be constructed. Using this, you should develop options that explore an appropriate urban concept for your site. We would expect numerous possibilities to be explored before you develop a more refined version of your preferred option. In the first instance, models should be made quickly and in a way that is not precious. The final model should be accurate and carefully made from timber.

A presentation will be made to introduce this stage.

Stage 2The second stage will be to develop a plan and facade concept for your building. Emphasis will be placed on drawings made at 1:100 scale for plans and elevations and 1:50 for section studies.

You will be expected to explain the relationship your building has to the city.

A presentation will be made to introduce this stage.

Stage 3The final piece of work will involve the production of two perspectives. The first one should represent the relationship of your building to the city. The second one should illustrate an interior and its relationship to the outside.A presentation will be made to introduce this phase of work.

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Programme 2009

Date Event Details Assignment

18 – 19 February 25 - 26 February4 – 5 March

11 – 12 March 17 – 18 March (AAM closed on 19 March) 25 – 26 March 1 April 15 – 16 April 22 – 23 April 29 – 30 April 6 – 7 May

Introduction to semester

TutorialsReviews

Field visit to London

Reviews

Tutorials

Reviews

Tutorials

Tutorials

Tutorials

Tutorials

Jonathan Sergison (JS) presentsstudio and spring semester.

Presentation on ‘illustration architecture’ by GN

Review of place of work study. Presentation: ‘How to make a survey of a building’ by Jonathan Sergison

Please see separate programme for detailed information

Review of survey workProject briefing

Lecture by JS: ‘A case for the normative’

Guest critic: Martin Steinmann

Introduction to stage 2

Book tickets and accommodation for London field trip

Choice of office interior

1:20 / 1:10 model photographed

Survey of housing projects and site visits

Survey drawing of office building1:100

Begin 1:500 workmodel of building in context

1:500 model

Plan, facade, section1:100 / 1:50 drawings

Plan, facade, section1:100 / 1:50 drawings

Plan, facade, section1:100 / 1:50 drawings

Plan, facade, section1:100 / 1:50 drawings

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Date Activity Event Assignment

13 – 14 May Reviews

20 – 21 May 27 – 28 May

Tutorials

Final review

Presentation of perspective

drawing, reference drawings

Invited critics: Eric Parry, Cino Zucchi

1:100 drawings

1:50 sections

Perspective

1:500 model1:100 plans1:100 elevations1:50 section1 external perspective1 internal perspectivePowerpoint presentation

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Reading list

The Architecture of the CityAldo Rossi, MIT Press 1982

A Guide to the Architecture of LondonEdward Jones & Christopher Woodward, Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2009

Papers 2Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates, London 2007

Words and BuildingsAdrian Forty, Thames and Hudson, London 2000

London: the biographyPeter Ackroyd, Chatto and Windus 2000

Georgian LondonJohn Summerson, Yale University Press 2003

Without and withinMark Pimlott, episode publishers 2008

Tower and OfficeIñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros, MIT press 2003

Curtain Call. Melbourne’s Mid-century Curtain Walls Marika Neustupny, RMIT University Press, Melbourne 2006

Reconstructing Space: Architecture in Recent German Photography Michael Mack (ed.), Architectural Association, London 1999

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Contacts

ProfessorJonathan Sergisonjonathan.sergison@usi.ch

AssistantsMarina Aldrovandimarina.aldrovandi@usi.cht +44 (0)20 7255 1564

Federico Tranfafederico.tranfa@usi.cht +39 335 5462 836

Georg Nickischgeorg.nickisch@usi.cht +41 (0)76 4323531

Studio3rd floorPalazzo Canaveé

Office C 3.75Palazzo Canaveét +41 (0)58 666 5737